Julia Steiny: Graduating From High School with Great Work Habits

Melissa Hall, Vice Principal of Greene Charter School in W. Greenwich, RI has been keeping an eye out the window while she and others were answering my questions. A staff member looks up from her work in the school’s cramped administrative office and offers to deal with it. Pausing a moment, Hall says, "No... Not yet. There are kids out there. Let's wait to see if they handle it."

Clearly, the 9-grade team responsible for tending to the school's chickens got distracted and had an oops. Chickens, compost and a garden are integral to Greene’s focus on the environment. Each staff member heads up a “crew” of 15 students who meet at least daily, and together they steward their local eco-system while learning to be a team.

After a bit Hall turns her back to the window, pleased to report that the escaped poultry were back in their coop. At no point were the adults particularly fussed about the problem. They were on it, if need be, but far better to let the kids have a minor panic about their carelessness. Natural consequences are great teachers. Adults do kids no favor by jumping up to fix things for them before they have had a chance to make things right themselves.

Teaching students how to take responsibility

This is huge. And, as Head of School Deanna Duncan points out, cultivating an atmosphere of accepting responsibility takes patience and gobs of attention. Many parents and teachers struggle mightily just getting kids to do their school work, never mind doing service in the community or turning compost. But Greene's Expeditionary Learning (EL) approach teaches that "We are crew, not passengers." Adults and students alike are "strengthened by acts of consequential service to others." They have jobs and obligations for their mutual benefit. They're in it together, and they’re not passive.

But what’s even huger, to my mind, is that Greene and their EL design consultants have not only brought back from the near-dead, but have improved one of my all-time favorite educational strategies: “advisories.” Back in the late 1980s, the seminal work Turning Points insisted that public schools “personalize” education. That horribly impersonal word referred to having small groups of students regularly hang with an adult to ensure that every kid was known well by at least one adult in the building. Advisories were designed to counter the lack of attention kids were getting at home and in their communities. So-called "factory-model" schools just replicate kids’ starvation for healthy attention, and in many ways makes it worse. By contrast, most private schools have always had some form of advisory to make good on their promise to give students “personal attention.”

Advisories seem like a well-duh of education.

Sadly these days, many schools that still schedule advisory time allow teachers to waste the time by letting the kids do homework, or talk or text. Not at Greene. What they call “Crew” has a curriculum of its own, designed to teach students Habits of Work (HOW), including giving them tasks they have to figure with their team. Crews stay together for 4 years, so if you’re not getting along with teammates, you’d better learn to. These behavioral expectations, the HOW, are spelled out in detail. Students learn both the basics of reliability and the good 'tude habits that everyone needs to keep a job. But math and literacy are also woven throughout. One goal states: "I can demonstrate basic financial math to promote my understanding of our economic system."

The over-arching questions of Crew are:

* Who am I?

* How am I doing?

* Who do I want to be?

Students can get straight "A"s in their academic subjects, but if they blow their performance on HOW, privileges and choices are reduced. The consequence for serious underperformance in HOW is 30 hours of community service over the summer.

So, for example, Jamiel, a senior from Johnston, hardly paid attention in math class because he felt he just wasn't good at it. An important HOW is "being in the moment." He says, "I had big trouble with the math. Math is everywhere; it's part of everyday life. If you can't do math, you can't do much. But here at Greene, we have this "yet" thing. I can't do this YET. You can't say 'I can't,' but you can say 'I can't do that yet.' So I work with being in the moment with the work. I'm growing a positive mindset."

Crews act as a peer-accountability systems that guide emerging adults towards habits of self-control and self-maintenance that are as important as academics when starting out post-high-school.

Duncan says, "Our students know what it means to learn good habits that will help them be successful out in the world. We intentionally spend as much time focused on climate and culture as on academics. Students need to take ownership of their behavior as well as their learning. We all have to be responsible to our community."

Including those wanton chickens.

Julia Steiny is a freelance columnist whose work also regularly appears at EducationNews.org . She is the founding director of the Youth Restoration Project, a restorative-practices initiative, currently building demonstration projects in Rhode Island. She consults for schools and government initiatives, including regular work for The Providence Plan for whom she analyzes data. For more detail, see juliasteiny.com or contact her at juliasteiny@gmail.com or c/o GoLocalProv, 44 Weybosset Street, Providence, RI 02903.